INFLUENCE

A
PRIMER
 HA
W

ER
TM A D
A KE S A LE

MORE THAN
SOUND
morethansound.net
Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence:
Influence: A Primer
by Daniel Goleman / Richard Boyatzis /
Vanessa Druskat / Matthew Lippincott /
Peter Senge / Matthew Taylor
ISBN 978-1-946998-03-3
Copyright © 2017 by More Than Sound, LLC
All Rights Reserved
Published by More Than Sound, LLC
221 Pine St., Suite 408, Florence MA 01062
 Table of Contents

Emotional Intelligence Competencies:

An Introduction 6
By Daniel Goleman
Influence: An Introduction 24
By Daniel Goleman
Influence in Action 29
By Richard Boyatzis
3 Companies, 3 Paths to Influence 33
By Peter Senge
Teams and Influence 46
By Vanessa Druskat
Influence and Leader Performance 54
By Matthew Lippincott
Cultivating the Influence Competency 61
By Matthew Taylor
Conclusion 70
By Daniel Goleman
 Emotional Intelligence, a different way of
being smart, is a key to high performance at all
levels, particularly for outstanding leadership. It’s
not your IQ ; it’s how you manage yourself and
your relationships.

There are four parts to the Emotional and

Social Intelligence model:
R5 Self-Awareness
R5 Self-Management
R5 Social Awareness
R5 Relationship Management
 Influence is a social competency. Leaders
who are equipped with the emotional self-
awareness and self-control to manage themselves
while being adaptable, positive, and empathic can
express their ideas in a way that will appeal to
others. Influence is necessary for any leadership
style, and can be done in a way that is meaningful
and effective or fraught with resistance. Leaders
competent in Influence will gather support from
others with relative ease and are able to lead a
group who is engaged, mobilized, and ready to
execute on the tasks at hand.
Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence
Competencies:
An Introduction

By Daniel Goleman
Who was the best leader or manager you’ve
ever worked with?
What did they say or do to make you love
working with them?
These qualities are grounded in how they
related to you and to others—reflecting their
emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence, a different way
of being smart, is a key to high performance at
all levels, particularly for outstanding leadership.
It’s not your IQ; it’s how you manage yourself
and your relationships. It’s not usually taught in
schools. You learn it in daily life—at home, on the

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 Influence: A Primer

playground, or in the office. David McClelland,

my mentor in graduate school, made a radical
proposal for those days. He wrote an article in
the journal American Psychologist that argued,
hire for competence not for intelligence.1 Test for
competence, not for intelligence.
A Competence Model
What McClelland meant was this: If you
want to know the best person for a given job,
don’t look at their IQ scores, don’t look at how
well they did in school. Look, instead, at people
now in your organization who are in the top 10%
of performers who hold that position. Compare
them to people in the same job who are only
average. Do a systematic analysis and determine
the abilities, or competencies, that you find in the
stars that you don’t see in the average.
That gives you what is called a competence
model. Today, every organization that has a
high-quality Human Resources operation uses a
competence model for their key positions. They

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

use it to hire people. They use it to promote people.

And, now they know what to help people develop
so they can become star leaders.
What Kind of Competence?
There are two kinds of competencies.
There are threshold competencies that everyone
needs to get the job. IQ turns out to be largely
a threshold competence. When you apply for a
job you must show you have the intelligence to
handle the cognitive complexity of that particular
position. But once you’re hired, you’re working
with and competing with people who are as
smart as you are. There’s what’s called a “floor
effect” for IQ. That is, it’s an important base-level
skill that everyone must have for that position.
The other kind of competence, a distinguishing
competency, is what sets apart the outstanding
performers from the average ones at any given job.
It’s the distinguishing competencies that
count in terms of promotion, in terms of being
a highly effective performer, or an outstanding

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 Influence: A Primer

leader. I did an analysis after I wrote Emotional

Intelligence.2 I asked close to 100 organizations
to let me look at their competence models. It’s
unusual, because these are normally proprietary
information. A given company wants to know,
who should we hire? Who should we promote?
They don’t want to share this information with
other companies.
I aggregated all of these models and looked
at the composite with one question in mind: Of
the distinguishing competencies independently
chosen by these organizations, how many are
based on IQ—purely cognitive abilities like
analytic reasoning or a technical skill—and how
many are based on emotional intelligence?

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

Why Emotional
Intelligence Matters
What I found was quite revealing. It
turned out, for jobs of all kinds, at all levels, on
average, emotional intelligence was twice as
important as cognitive ability in terms of the
distinguishing competencies. The higher you go
in the organization, the more it matters. If you
look at top leadership positions, C-suite positions,
you’ll see that 80 to 90%, sometimes 100%, of the
competencies that organizations independently
determined to set apart their star leaders are based
on emotional intelligence.

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 Influence: A Primer

What is Emotional Intelligence?

SELF SELF
AWARENESS MANAGEMENT

SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP
AWARENESS MANAGEMENT

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

There are four parts to my Emotional and

Social Intelligence Model:
R5 Self-Awareness
R5 Self-Management
R5 Social Awareness
R5 Relationship Management
Within each of these four parts, or domains,
there are learned competencies based on the
underlying ability that make people outstanding
in the workplace. By learned competencies, I mean
that these are skills that can be developed just like
you can develop other skills. To understand those
competencies, my colleague Richard Boyatzis
from Case Western Reserve University and I
looked at the full range of competencies that
companies identified in their outstanding leaders.
We distilled them down to twelve
generic competencies that embody the core of
distinguishing abilities of leaders in organizations
of all kinds. From that we developed a 360-degree
rating instrument called the Emotional and Social

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 Influence: A Primer

Competency Inventory (ESCI). By 360-degree,

I mean the instrument has the leader rate
themselves, and choose to also be rated by the
people whom they trust and whose opinions they
value. This gives the fullest picture, combining
a self-assessment with the same evaluations by
other people. This assessment instrument, called
the ESCI 360, is now available from Korn Ferry
Hay Group.3

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence
Competencies

SELF
AWARENESS

EMOTIONAL
SELF
AWARENESS

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 Influence: A Primer

SELF
MANAGEMENT

EMOTIONAL
SELF ADAPTABILITY
CONTROL

ACHIEVEMENT POSITIVE
ORIENTATION OUTLOOK

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

SOCIAL
AWARENESS

EMPATHY

ORGANI-
ZATIONAL
AWARENESS

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 Influence: A Primer

RELATIONSHIP
MANAGEMENT

COACH
INSPIRATIONAL
INFLUENCE and
LEADERSHIP
MENTOR

CONFLICT
TEAMWORK
MANAGEMENT

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

There are two sets of Emotional

Intelligence Competencies. The first is crucial
for leading ourselves, for self-management. It
includes Emotional Self-Awareness, Emotional
Self-Control, and other competencies. These are
the skills that play out on an individual basis.
They refer to how we relate to ourselves, our
emotions, and our responses to the world around
us. The second set of competencies deals with how
we relate to others. It includes our relationships
and awareness of other people. They are crucial
for teamwork, for sales, for handling clients, and
particularly for leadership.
The self-management competencies are:
R5 Emotional Self-Awareness
R5 Emotional Self-Control
R5 Positive Outlook
R5 Achievement Orientation
R5 Adaptability

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 Influence: A Primer

The relationship management

competencies are:
R5 Empathy
R5 Organizational Awareness
R5 Influence
R5 Coach and Mentor
R5 Inspirational Leadership
R5 Teamwork
R5 Conflict Management
In the Building Blocks of Emotional
Intelligence: The 12 Crucial Competencies series,
my colleagues and I look at each of these
competencies, what they are, why they matter, and
how to develop them.

Leader Emotional Intelligence

and Performance
Korn Ferry Hay Group researchers4 looked
at these 12 Emotional and Social Intelligence
Leadership Competencies in terms of how they

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

impacted the style of a leader, the climate that

leader produced, negative or positive, and whether
the outcome was high or low performance.
What they found was quite telling. If a leader
has strengths in six to ten of these Emotional
and Social Intelligence Competencies, he or she
produces a very positive climate. Leaders with
strengths in EI/SI Competencies tend to use
leadership styles that improves work climate. The
styles that tend to produce a positive work climate
are:
R5 The visionary leader who articulates
a shared mission and gives long-term
direction
R5 the participative leader who gets
consensus inputs to generate new ideas
and build commitment
R5 the coaching leader who fosters
personal and career development
R5 the affiliative leader who creates trust
and harmony.

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 Influence: A Primer

These styles result in outstanding

performance, as well as greater satisfaction and
better quality of work of the whole team.
The organizational consequences can
be great. The leader’s EI Competencies boost
employee effectiveness in several crucial ways:
operational excellence, customer loyalty, financial
performance, and attracting and retaining talent.
People are willing to go the extra mile.5
On the other hand, if a leader has strengths
in three or fewer of the 12 Emotional and Social
Intelligence Competencies, they tend to fall
back on what’s called the “directive,” or coercive
approach, just giving commands, ordering people
around. That doesn’t work in the long run, because
these leaders don’t engage their team members.
They don’t provide long-term direction. They
don’t try to create harmony or listen to people,
nor do they encourage new ideas or invest in
the development of the members of their team.
Instead, they just tell them what to do.

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

Or they become pacesetters, a leadership

style focused mainly on hitting targets – but that
can hurt climate when the leader ignores all the
positive styles. Such leaders tend to give feedback
that highlights the negative, not the positive,
lowering morale. Both directive and overly
pacesetting leaders produce a negative climate and
very poor performance all around.

Influence in Leadership
Influence is a social competency. Leaders
who are equipped with the emotional self-
awareness and self-control to manage themselves
while being adaptable, positive, and empathic can
express their ideas in a way that will appeal to
others. Influence is necessary for any leadership
style, and can be done in a way that is meaningful
and effective or fraught with resistance. Leaders
competent in influence will gather support from
others with relative ease and are able to lead a
group who is engaged, mobilized, and ready to

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 Influence: A Primer

execute on the tasks at hand. This is how real

progress is made, how extraordinary successes are
accomplished. How does a leader leverage these
abilities to become influential? That is the focus
of this Primer.

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

Influence:
An Introduction

By Daniel Goleman
Influence as a competency refers to the
ability to have a positive impact on others, to
persuade or convince them to gain their support.
With the Influence competency, you’re persuasive
and engaging, and you can build buy-in from key
people.
A CEO who headed a company based in
Manhattan decided to move the company to a
city 1,000 miles away. He hoped to save money
because there were tax benefits and labor was
cheaper. Also, he had grown up in that city and
never felt comfortable in Manhattan. But when
he announced the move, it resulted in a wave of
people quitting. They didn’t want to go to that
small city. He particularly lost people in the IT

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 Influence: A Primer

staff. With them went a lot of crucial, unwritten

information about how IT operated at that
company. The company ended up having to hire
the former employees for a high consulting fee to
retrieve the crucial information.
That CEO’s lack of skill at the Influence
competency cost his company a great deal of
money and lost revenue.
Here is scientific data about the important
impact of influence. In a study of financial service
sales executives,6 the Influence competency
predicted greater sales revenue. The ability to
influence is essential to a successful sale. For the
top salespeople and client managers, tellingly,
building a strong, ongoing relationship turns
out to be more important than making a specific
sale—the stars would rather keep the customer
or client than sell them something they will be
unhappy with.7
This points to the importance of the
relationship itself for the ability to influence.8

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

Establishing trust seems a precondition for the

ease of influence. To change someone’s mind, it
helps to first build a connection where they will be
more open to hearing what you have to say.
Among the helping professions, Influence
was the strongest competency distinguishing
outstanding performers.9 In a helping role, success
comes down to whether you can connect with
people’s understanding of what matters, see their
perspective, and use that insight to communicate
powerfully. For physicians, it means that their
patients comply with what the doctor tells them
to do, whether it is to exercise more or take their
medicine.
Influence has a strongly positive impact
in the success of any executive. This may be
particularly true for leaders who, for example,
have many different groups reporting to them.
Remember, leadership is the art of getting work
done well through other people. And influence is
the most powerful way to do that. By the same
token, influence is also crucial when you work

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 Influence: A Primer

with a division over which you have no direct

authority, yet their work is necessary to your own
success. You can’t order them to do what you want,
you must persuade or inspire them to put forth
their best efforts toward the clear objective you
have defined.
To the extent each one of us has a personal
sphere of influence, we are all leaders. When it
comes to leadership styles, the visionary leader—
who articulates a deeply felt vision that resonates
with and motivates others—shows one obvious
use of influence. But acting as a coach and mentor,
another leadership style (and another competence),
opens the way to a personal connection that can
itself be a highway to influencing that person.
Two other leadership styles—the consensus-
seeker and the affiliative leader who see the value
in having a good time together—build the kind
of positive relationships that allow them to exert
influence during their ordinary interactions. All of
these styles have a positive impact on emotional
climate.10

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Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

On the other hand, two common leadership

styles have both a negative impact on the climate of
an organization and are obstacles to influence. The
pacesetter, who sees only what people do wrong,
never giving praise, alienates people. So, does the
old-style command-and-control leader who just
orders people around. Both of these styles create
negative feelings in those they lead, and so close
people to any attempts to influence them.
Influence draws on empathy—without
understanding the other person’s perspective and
sensing their feelings, influencing them becomes
more difficult. So, like many EI competencies,
influence works best in tandem with other specific
competencies.
Visit More Than Sound for the remainder
of this primer, and to see the full Emotional and
Social Intelligence Leadership Competency Primer
series. Morethansound.net.

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Also available in
the Building Blocks of
Emotional Intelligence

morethansound.net